


the blood stained blues

by lunariaans



Series: reds, greens, and blues [1]
Category: Fire Emblem Echoes: Mou Hitori no Eiyuu Ou | Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Fire Emblem Series
Genre: Angst, Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-22
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-08-06 02:05:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16379324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunariaans/pseuds/lunariaans
Summary: Silque doesn't save Forsyth.





	the blood stained blues

Silque doesn’t save Forsyth.  
  
She can’t. He loses too much blood and there’s too much magic in his system; it makes his heart pump faster, pushing out more and more blood. He cries out in pain as she sticks her hands into wounds, her voicing shaking so badly as she tries and tries to recite spells of healing. But she can’t save him.  
  
Eventually his cries fade away. He has a tight grip on her leg that she doesn’t even notice until it starts to loosen up, and eventually, slips off and away. She’s so startled by the feeling that she stops chanting for only a second to look up at his face, and when his eyes meet hers, he lets out a soft breath of air, and then his chest stops moving.  
  
She slaps a bloodied hand over her mouth to try and stop the cry from escaping her lips, but she makes the ugly sound anyway. She quickly starts reciting again, as fast as she can. But it isn’t working, the Mother’s magic is _not_ working.  
  
Her heart beats wildly against her chest, her throat feels tight and her nose burns with the smell of blood. It’s so slick and wet, so awful and warm, but Forsyth’s skin has gone cold already. He’s so, so cold.  
  
“Silque,” she hears Lukas say, the only person she had allowed in the medical tent to watch. “You’ve done all you could.”  
  
She lets out a cry, trying to keep up with the spell, but the glow from her hands is ugly and awful because it doesn’t work.  
  
“Silque,” Lukas repeats, his voice sounding strained as he places his hand on her shoulder. “That’s enough now.”  
  
She stops the spell, her shoulders shaking as her fingers linger in his wounds and lay in his blood. But Forsyth doesn’t care; he can’t anymore.    
  
She looks up at his face; his eyes aren’t even closed. They’re half-lidded and glassy and they’re still staring at her, speaking to her, _accusing_ her. _You were supposed to save me._ __  
  
She gets up and stumbles out of the tent, only making it a few feet outside before she throws up. She’s never, _ever_ seen anything like that.  
  
“Hey—” a worried voice calls out behind her, and she holds back another strangled noise as she realizes Python has been waiting outside for her to finish. Python was expecting things to be fine, just as he always did.  
  
Her eyes burn, her nose burns, her throat burns; all she can taste and smell is rust. She wonders if this is divine punishment for not doing her job right.  
  
“Silque?” Python says, and she has never heard him sound so worried before. She can’t turn to face him, but can only try to hold back sobs as the white hot tears spill over and fall down her cheeks, mixing with Forsyth’s blood still stained there.  
  
Python doesn’t wait for her to answer; instead he turns and enters the tent. Silque isn’t sure what she’s expecting to hear when he sees his friend—a scream, a cry—but she sure isn’t expecting the ineffable silence that follows the departure.  
  
She doesn’t ever want to be seen again, doesn’t ever want to view Forsyth or face Python, ever again. But she wipes at her mouth with the back of a bloody hand, and it feels like a dream as she reenters the tent to see Python standing over him, face blank, fists closed.  
  
Python looks up from his friend to meet her eyes, and the lack of emotion is what makes her feel the worst. She’d rather he be angry, upset with her, she’d rather he scream and yell and cry at her, tell her she’s awful and that she’s a murderer, that it’s all her fault. She’d rather hear something ugly than such heavy, heavy silence.  
  
She’s too afraid to cry in front of him. It takes all of her willpower to hold back more tears than she’s already let out; Forsyth was not her friend to cry for. She did not know him like Python did.  
  
She looks down at her hands, but they’re so saturated with red that she can’t even see the flesh tones of her skin. His blood is still drying on her hands, her robes, her face. If she licks her lips, she probably won’t be able to taste anything but it for weeks to come.  
  
“I’m so—“ she begins to say, but Python walks out of the tent as quickly as he had entered, and she doesn’t know where he is going, can’t find the courage to ask.  
  
So she lets out a sob and sinks to the floor and cries and cries and cries, because her throat and her eyes and her nose only burn, burn, burn, and Lukas drops to the floor in front of her, tries to calm her, but her sobs drown his lovely voice out.  
  
_He’s dead_ , she thinks, over and over, the words being carved into her mind just as easily as her spells that don’t work. He’s dead, he’s dead, _he’s dead_ .  
  
And she couldn’t save him.  


 

  
  
  
“You look like a mess,” Faye says to her as she stumbles into their shared tent, eyes wide.  
  
Silque doesn’t say anything, can’t think of anything to. She just looks at her confused.  
  
“There’s blood all over your face—and your body,” Faye continues with nervous laughter. “It looks like you’ve been in a fight.”  
  
Silque might’ve laughed had it been twenty minutes ago. But now she just stands there and looks at Faye, a million thoughts at once running through her head and yet none there at all.  
  
“Silque,” Faye says suspiciously—cautiously. “What happened?”  
  
Something in her breaks as she’s brought back to the reality of it all. Blood and blood and blood, and only more blood. Her thoughts are filled with blood.  
  
“Forsyth died,” she says quietly, tearing her gaze away from Faye to look down at those bloody hands.  
  
The air of the tent grows tense. Faye’s shoulders drop. Silque can see her open and close her mouth, possibly wanting to ask _How? Why?_ But she instead settles for a quiet, “Oh.”  
  
Silque feels her throat burn again, her eyes watering up, but she refuses to cry. She doesn’t want to cry because it’s not her place to.  
  
“Are you okay?” Faye asks, her tone tender. But Silque can’t find it in her to lie and say she is. So she just shrugs, trying her best to swallow back sobs.  
  
She just wants to be held. She wants someone to wrap their arms around her and tell her that everything will be fine, Forsyth’s only playing a joke on her, this blood isn’t real. She wants to be rocked in someone’s lap, held in someone’s arms and told that it’s all okay, it’s just a bad dream.  
  
But no one ever has, so she knows no one ever will. She’s covered in blood. She doesn’t imagine anyone would want to hold her anyway.  
  
“Stay here,” Faye says, pulling Silque into the tent and sitting her on the floor. “I’ll go get a bucket of water.”  
  
Faye turns and leaves and Silque sits on the earthy floor, pulling her knees up to her chest, ripping the headdress off her head and throwing it to the side.  
  
She hates being covered in blood, she hates it, she hates it, she hates it. She hates the smell and the taste and the sticky feeling. She hates Forsyth’s blood, so much, but it’s stuck dry to her skin and her clothes.  
  
She rubs at her face with the back of her hand and watches as the dried blood comes crumbling off into her lap. She chokes back a sob.  
  
No one will hold her with so much blood on her hands.  
  
So she wraps her arms around herself and tries to find the way to breathe without sobbing again because she doesn’t want to cry.  


 

 

  
Lukas places a hand on her shoulder at night, bringing her back from her blank thoughts. His hands are big and tough and warm—she feels like he could easily break her if he wanted to—but he’s gentle and kind and soft when he looks at her, sympathetic almost.  
  
Or maybe it is pity, feeling sorry for her as he looks down at her. It’s always hard to tell with Lukas.  
  
“May I sit here?” he asks, gesturing to the space on the log next to her. She silently nods her head.  
  
They don’t say anything for a long moment, they just look at the fire, listen to it crackle and burn as the nighttime sounds of the forest around camp break through the trees.  
  
“It’s not your fault,” he tells her for what just might be the one thousandth time. “You did everything you could.”  
  
“Did I…” she answers absently, her own voice sounding foreign to her ears. “Maybe I could have done more.”  
  
“You couldn’t,” he reassures her. She wishes she were as confident as him, but confidence doesn’t exist within her anymore.  
  
Another long silence fills the space between them. She wonders why Lukas is still here, why he hasn’t called her a murderer yet.  
  
“Python wants to see you.”  
  
Her breath comes out harder than she means for it to. “I do not want to see him.”  
  
“You cannot hide forever.”  
  
“I’m not hiding.”  
  
“Silque...”  
  
She swallows, tries to push down the lump forming in her throat.  
  
“I’ll come with you if you’d like,” he offers. But she shakes her head, the lump in her throat rising.  
  
“I’d really rather not see him.”  
  
“He can’t blame you.”  
  
“But what if he does? What if I do?”  
  
“You’ve done nothing wrong.”  
  
She places a hand against her cheek. Her skin is still red and raw from scrubbing so hard, and yet Forsyth’s blood is still a phantom feeling on her face.  
  
“Forsyth is gone,” she whispers to the fire. She’s wearing clothes that are not hers, wearing faces that are fake.  
  
“I know,” Lukas says, but his voice is too calm, as if it’s the weather that he knows about.  
  
“Forsyth is gone,” she repeats, but the words don’t burn up in the flames like she wants them to.  
  
Lukas sighs, lets himself slouch forward as he runs a hand over his face. Silque wishes he would leave and take the feelings with him. With how cold he sometimes seems, she wonders if he is even aching too, or if it is just a brave face to keep peace within the camp.

“Just talk to Python,” he says before standing up. “Believe it or not, you may need it more than him.”  
  
Silque doesn’t want to see him. She’s scared he’ll say what she’s so afraid to hear.  
  
Lukas places a reassuring hand on her shoulder before he leaves. It’s big, but gentle—just like Forsyth’s—and there’s the sudden fear that if she turns around she might see a ghost there.    


 

  
  
  
Silque wants nothing more than to stand before Forsyth and lay her heart bare for him.  
  
She wants nothing more than to say that she is sorry, that she could’ve done more. She wants to tell him that he has every right to be mad and to hate her. But she knows she will never get such a chance.  
  
By now, Forsyth has already been buried in the middle of the woods somewhere; during the middle of a war, there is no time to send bodies home.  
  
Somewhere deep in the forest—she wants to see if she can find him. She wants to see if she can get lost herself and never have to return.  
  
Lukas had stopped her before she could. So now she lies on her bedroll in her tent, staring hard at Faye’s back as she sleeps soundly.    
  
She wonders if his family knows, what his family thinks. She wonders what Python thinks.  
  
Forsyth is there haunting her even without a ghost and he’s starting to take the shape of Python. Python was everything to Forsyth, Forsyth was everything to Python. And she took that away from them.  
  
She avoids him when she can. She wonders if he does the same.  
  
She remembers how Forsyth was always looking out for her. Always kind and caring, brave and strong. He always protected her, always saved her, but in the end, she could not even return the favor.  
  
Her throat burns.  
  
“It’s okay to cry,” she remembers telling Genny once back home, running a hand through that curly hair. “Sometimes you just need to let it all out.”  
  
But Silque holds back tears now even when she wants nothing more than to let them go. _I’m not allowed to cry_ , she thinks, _it isn’t fair if I do_ .  
  
Tears drip off her chin.  
  
_It’s okay to cry_ , she remembers saying a long time ago, but she wants to know why it hurts so much when she does it now.  
  
Has crying always burned like this?  
  
_It’s okay to cry_ , she remembers being told, but she can’t remember who it was that said it.  
  
There’s a fear that she’ll wake Faye up and have her worry again. She rolls over onto her stomach and buries her head into her arms, praying for something to take the pain away.  
  
But it never comes.  
  


 

  
  
She doesn’t sleep, can’t find it in her to usually, but she finally nods off one night in the medical tent.  
  
There’s a rustle of the tent flap, the sound of heavy footsteps against the earthy floor, and the annoyed sigh that escapes their mouth.  
  
Silque looks up, pretends she wasn’t about to crash from exhaustion, but soon regrets not doing so.  
  
Python stands there, his form dark and his shadow long, and Silque feels her heart skip a beat—or maybe it is breaking.  
  
He stands there and just looks at her, and it’s hard to make out his expression with his back to the moon, so she sits there frozen with fear.  
  
His gaze moves from hers to the cots, and she doesn’t have to follow to know which one he is looking at. Maybe he is like her, hoping that one day he will come in to see Forsyth only sleeping there, nursing some minor wounds.  
  
Both know that it’s a fool’s wish, but that doesn’t stop either from wishing it.  
  
He steps in, stumbles over to the cot next to it and collapses. Silque knows she should rush over and see if he’s alright, but fear weighs her down now more than it ever has.  
  
“Forsyth spoke to me today,” he says. Silque’s eyes widen— _that couldn’t be_ —but she’s morbid and curious and childish in her foolish hopefulness.  
  
“What did he say?”  
  
Python shrugs, stares hard up at the canvas of the tent. He plays with his fingers, lets his long legs hang off either side of the cot.  
  
“I dunno. It was in a dream.”  
  
“What a lovely dream...” she whispers, and she’s not sure then if she wants to cry or if she feels only numb anymore.  
  
“It was nice,” he admits. “Wish it were real.”  
  
His gaze catches hers at that; she forces herself to look away.  
  
There’s a long moment of silence, of her heart pounding and breaking in her ears. Python’s presence is enough to make her cower.  
  
“Silque,” he says then, his voice unusual and unsure.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Where do you think we go when we die?”  
  
A soft breath escapes her lips. So forward, so unforgiving and unashamed.  
  
She was told as a child that Duma saved the dead, that he guided them home, but then taught later that Mila saved the lost souls and brought them to some sort of paradise.  
  
“What kind of answer would you like?”  
  
“A truthful one.”  
  
Her hands feel cold and stiff. She folds her fingers together.  
  
“I don’t know,” she admits, ashamed to say so. “We won’t know until we die.”  
  
Python lets out a hollow laugh.  
  
“I bet Forsyth knows.”  
  
A lump forms in her throat—heartbreak is an awful feeling.  
  
“I am sure he does.”  
  
Python sits up on the edge of the cot. He looks at her and she wants to shrink into nothing. She doesn’t want to be accused, she doesn’t want to be guilty. But she knows she is.  
  
“Forsyth is my best friend.” He pauses, shakes his head. “Was my best friend.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“He knows a lot more than we do now.”  
  
She stares down at her lap. Vile thoughts of his blood fill her head—her hands, her face, her robes, her hair—she wonders why he cannot just leave her be.  
  
Guilt is an ugly thing. It’s consuming her faster than she can think, but the only thing she really thinks about anymore is that it is what she deserves. The feeling that Forsyth’s death is all her fault—she doesn’t bother to fight it off.  
  
Silence is heavy, that’s something she knows very well now.  
  
She stands.  
  
Python doesn’t notice—or at least, he pretends not to as she comes to stand before him.

  
Humility is what she wants, her head and heart full of remorse, but she wonders if he can give it.

  
“Python—“

  
He doesn’t look up. He doesn’t bother to acknowledge her. Her fingers feel cold and her body just feels numb as she stands there and isn’t quite sure what she wants to say that doesn’t sound forced.

It’s all forced to her though; breathing, living, carrying on when he no longer can. It’s only ever forced now.

“I’m sorry,” she chokes out, tears finding their way back to her once again. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save him.”

She watches as Python just stares at the ground for a long moment before falling back against the cot, eyes shut tight as he drapes an arm over them.

He takes a deep breath, and chokes on a sob, and Silque knows then that he is forcing himself too.

  


 

 

Without Lukas knowing, Python brings her to Forsyth’s grave, the entire trek through the woods silent save for the animals in the trees.

The earth where he is buried is still freshly turned, and the only indication that it is even a grave at all is the single clump of flowers lying on top of it, white and pure and fragile.

 _Forsyth’s down there_ , she thinks, morbidly wondering who dug the hole.

“Since you didn’t come to his funeral, he never got a proper sending,” Python speaks up, but she can tell from the way he says _funeral_ that he finds nothing proper about any of this, that he is mad and bitter about all of it.

And she of course doesn’t blame him.

“You want me to recite the Mother’s prayer,” she realizes, wondering why Python of all people would ask for it.

But he silently nods his head, so she takes a hesitant step towards it and clasps her hands together, reciting a prayer she’s never really had to before, and hopes that she never will again.

In truth, she has been praying a lot since he’s been gone, but those prayers all go unanswered. She can’t tell if this is part of some sort of divine plan, or if Mila just doesn’t care anymore. The more she prays, the more she wonders, the more she hurts.

But Python asks her to send Forsyth off and so she does, even if she doesn’t want to, even if it isn’t fair.

The words stop without her realizing, and before she knows it, she is just staring down at the dirt, the flowers on top. Forsyth did not make it home.

The familiar feeling of tears does not come; instead, there is just a numb and hollow feeling in her head, her fingers, her chest. It’s cold and it hurts, but she know that Python is hurting as well.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, but the mound doesn’t answer back.   

“Sorry won’t bring him back,” Python says from beside her, startling her out of the daze. “But...I think he’d forgive you.”

She doesn’t want to be forgiven, she doesn’t deserve mercy.

“You know he’d hate to see a pretty girl cry over him,” he continues, a bitter smile crossing his face, his own gaze fixated on the flowers.

Her breath comes out shaking and hard, but she is surprised when she feels his hand wrap around her wrist, the feeling so much different from Lukas and Forsyth.

She looks up at him, but he doesn’t look back. His face twitches and Silque knows that there is pain.

“I—“ he starts, but he stops himself soon after, his resolve beginning to crumble.

Forsyth is gone, she reminds herself, but Python is not, _she_ is not. Forsyth will get left behind as they move on, but she knows that the only direction time knows is forward.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, for the final time, only now she is sorry that Mila’s magic does not work on the heart like it was supposed to on his broken body.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't care if it's out of character, just let people cry.


End file.
